Biggest Winners And Losers Of Internet Security World For 2015

Before 2015 ended, lawmakers took a few initiatives that were pretty surprising. Some of the initiatives determined that most of the online users and their activities will now be totally transparent to the NSA and other spying agencies. It is, however, unclear at this point that for how much time this scenario will remain or whether it would stay or fade away. Nonetheless there have been some winners that fought against such ridiculous and unwanted cyber laws and came up victorious.

Meanwhile, there have been some losers too who could not protect their user’s privacy. There were those too who when caught started acting absolutely weird. We will take a look at both the winners and losers for 2015.

The winners

California Passes the Nation’s Best Digital Privacy Law

This brave act of California shocked a lot of people because it is not easy these days to stand against the metadata laws. While a lot of regions are providing various surveillance and law agencies the data of users, especially the metadata, California has passed the digital law according to which it will not give away any kind of user info without a proper warrant.

Apple vs. the Feds

Apple shocked the world as it went up against the feds by introducing built-in data encryption for their iPhones. Apple introduced internet security for photos, videos, contacts etc. via high-grade encryption that barred feds from peeking in to the activities of the iPhone users’ activities. Another new thing was that unlike the precedents of the iPhone series, the new iPhones could no longer be unlocked by Apple through its factory pass code.

Capitol Hill Two-Step

Federal law makers tried time and again to get a bill passed that would prevent the federal agencies from acquiring internet users’ data. After continuous efforts of almost a whole year, the law was passed and today NSA is helpless against the passage of the USA Freedom Act. Consequently, NSA’s bulk collection of phone records from US telecoms has been put to an end. This one surely the biggest win of the year.

FISA Court Finally Gets Public Advocates

The Edward Snowden leaks in 2013 made many things clear, especially the fact that the government needs to reform Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court of rotating federal judges was initially responsible for authorizing NSA and other agencies the controversial mass collection phone records along with its PRISM program that bulk collects data from Yahoo, Google and other companies. The collection is done through various means. Now, the scenario has changed and thanks to the USA Freedom Act, the court has picked five public advocates to balance the process and represent the public’s privacy interest in FISA court proceedings.

Internet Security Losers

Ashley Madison – When Cheaters Got Cheated

AshleyMadison.com, the far-famed service where married individuals cheated with other people, got hacked. The owners of the site were threatened that if they did not close down their business, their entire client database will be exposed online. The hacker wasn’t bluffing as he eventually put millions of names online of people who had accounts on AshleyMadison.com. This ruined many lives and taken many as well. Several people committed suicide after being exposed as Ashley Madison members and consequently, Noel Biderman, the CEO of Ashley Madison’s parent company, resigned from his job.

Gemalto’s Rapid Response to Hack was Too Rapid

Gemalto, the leading maker of mobile sim chips from Dutch, was hacked man years ago by the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ. The intention was to steal the cryptographic keys. The company insisted that spies were never able to get their hands on Gemalto’s data but a few years after, in 2015, they ran an investigation just to double check and guess what; they announced that they actually were breached. It made people raise eyebrows because the investigation on a 5 year old breach is extremely hard to carry out let alone coming to the solid conclusion that there was a breach and of what extent.

Oracle’s CSO’s Harsh Blog Post

While a lot of companies such as Microsoft appreciate users finding bugs and loopholes in their programs and reward them with lucrative bug bounties, Oracle did the total opposite. When a number of users brought Oracle’s attention towards internet security vulnerability in their system, Oracle’s Chief Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson wrote and published a 3,000 word rant against those users. She was loud and illogical throughout the post, which was one of the reasons why the blog post was hastily deleted by Oracle.

We have stepped into year 2016 and are expecting many internet security winners and losers this year as well. Beware of all the cyber threats and fight them through hide.me meanwhile we compile list of security winners and losers for 2016!